Showtime To Stream Whole Series For Emmy Voters' Consideration
Deal With Brightcove Will Save Premium Network More Than $100,000
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 1/31/2008 12:01:00 AM
Showtime will wage its 2008 Primetime Emmy campaign on the Internet, with plans to stream 82 full-length episodes of its original programming to 14,000 voters in “broadcast quality.”
The premium network is working with Internet TV services provider Brightcove to stream the shows to members of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the organization that presents the awards. Showtime's original series will be available beginning Feb. 15 through the final August judging phase.
Rich Licata, Showtime’s executive vice president of corporate communications, said that streaming the shows over the Internet -- rather than sending out DVDs -- will save the network more than $100,000.
What’s more, he said, delivering the videos over the Web is more “eco-friendly”: Showtime this year will send out just three DVDs with a sampling of 14 episodes, whereas last year it sent ATAS members 20 DVDs containing 80 installments.
Each ATAS member will receive a brochure and the three DVDs, along with a user name and password for access to a members-only section of Showtime’s site.
Starting Feb. 15, ATAS members will be able to stream complete current seasons of Weeds, Dexter,Brotherhood, Californication, and The L Word. Showtime claimed it’s the first network to make entire seasons available to ATAS members via the Internet.
Showtime will add programming that hasn’t yet debuted as it becomes available, the network said. That includes the second seasons of The Tudors and This American Life, Tracey Ullman's State of the Union, and An American Crime, a film starring Catherine Keener and Ellen Page.
Besides saving money, Licata said, streaming Internet video is more secure than distributing DVDs. “It’s virtually impossible for someone to pirate the video, or do something other than watch it on their computer,” he said.
Licata added, “There is going to be a limit to the number of times someone can view the episodes… If we see extraordinary usage from one account, we’ll shut it down.”
Cambridge, Mass.-based Brightcove already provides the back-end services to distribute video content on Sho.com. The site for Emmy voters will use Brightcove Show, an application that can adjust the quality of video depending on a user’s connection speed.
Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire said the player uses standard Adobe Flash format, and the video will be encoded in MPEG-4 H.264 format at between 500 kilobits per second to more than 2 megabits per second – providing “near HD” quality, he claimed.
According to Allaire, the Brightcove Show application directly competes with the Web-video player provided by Move Networks, whose customers include ABC, CBS, Fox, The CW and Discovery Channel.
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